To Walk the Path of Fearlessness

Photo by Dino Reichmuth on Unsplash

But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
~Mary Oliver from The Journey

I’ve been thinking a lot about values lately. I know freedom is my top value. I used to think that wasn’t a good thing to have as your most important value. Shouldn’t I value others or compassion more? I realized it’s okay to value what I value if it comes from my soul. So freedom is number one. Fulfillment is another. I don’t feel alive if something I’m doing doesn’t fulfill me.

Trust is something I value highly, too, but when I was writing for my Home page on my website the word fearlessness came up. Of course as a poet I love alliteration so the three fs just felt right. But I wondered, didn’t trust seem the better choice? Though I’m working on trusting more, it’s really about releasing the fear.

What Is Fearlessness?

To be fearless is not to ever feel fear. Fear is a gauge that can be helpful. Trust is the point of fearlessness. It’s not just “feel the fear and do it anyway” though that can work and can help you move toward fearlessness. Fearlessness is a state of such deep trust that fear vanishes. You could reach this state and jump off a cliff to the rocks below trusting you’d be safe. Maybe if you were completely enlightened you would make it. But most of us would meet our end. Fearlessness is not about transcending our physical reality but our made up one.

The fearlessness I’m talking about comes into play with fears not based on facts but stories we tell ourselves about how it’s impossible to try to do what we want and be who we are. It's the voices that tell us we're not worthy or good enough. To be fearlessness is to trust ourselves and hence Spirit.

Fear & Me

Fear has been with me for so long it has become a friend. It’s not a healthy relationship mind you. A healthy relationship to fear is a good thing. We don’t want to go climbing without the appropriate equipment and skill or ride our bikes down the middle of the highway. Fear can be a helpful friend. In many ways it hasn’t been that way for me.

I let fear rule my life for too long. It dictates my choices and makes me want to control everything and everyone. It makes me listen to the voices of the past that told me I'm not enough. I’m not living as though freedom is my highest value. I’m not free while fear rules.

I’m learning to release fear and to trust a little at a time. I hold fearlessness as a vision for myself. Boldly writing these words and sharing my story is a part of it. The next step is to have others publish my words and gain a wider audience. That scares the hell out of me. I’ve written something that has taken me a month to complete and I finally let go of the fear and sent it out yesterday. I could have finished sooner, but I let fear get in the way. One step at a time I move forward into fearlessness trusting Life.

Big Dreams & Our Creative Impulse

I have big dreams. Maybe you do, too. It’s time for me to not let them scare me so much that I never act on them. Action builds trust hence fearlessness. The less fear I feel, the more creative I am.

When we hold back and dim our light out of fear our creative impulse begins to turn on us in negative ways. A dark night ensues. But the impulse to create can never die. It can become an impulse to destroy though. Don’t let that happen to you.

And if you find yourself in the dark, know the stars are just behind the clouds. All it takes is one act of creation to bring you back to life and the path to fearlessness. One act can open the sky and spill starlight onto the path that was always yours.